Peak Oil Meets Climate Change In Obama's Front Yard

More than 500 people, including actor Darryl Hannah, have been arrested for protesting at the White House against the proposed tar sands oil pipeline from western Canada to Texas.

At the same time, peak oil studies reveal that spikes in oil prices are going to keep getting worse for the foreseeable future.

But exploiting tar sands is not only not the solution, it's going to make everything worse.

Brian Beutler at TPM:

What the heck is this all about?

At issue isn't just NIMBYism or standard concerns about oil spills, but the question of whether the United States should accelerate an extraction process that some environmental experts say will lose the fight against global warming forever.

The oil in question comes from the Canadian oil sands -- or tar sands, as opponents refer to it. It's not just regular oil, but highly corrosive and particularly carbon intensive. The process of extracting the oil from the sands is more energy intensive than drilling for crude. It entails destruction of Canada's Boreal forest, which serves as a carbon sink, making this particular resource extraction a global warming double whammy.

But maybe you think global climate change is a myth and high gas prices are Obama's fault. Or maybe you're old enough to not give a shit about climate change and rich enough to afford gas at any price.

Do you care about something that is causing permanent economic contraction?

Yep, our dependency on oil is strangling the economy, prolonging the recession and preventing growth.

Kevin Drum:

I've talked a few times about the possibility that world growth is now constrained by oil production. The basic story is simple: As long as there's spare oil-production capacity, increasing demand caused by economic growth produces only a steady, manageable increase in oil prices. But oil production is now close to its maximum and can't be easily or quickly expanded. When the global economy grows enough that demand starts to bump up against this ceiling, oil prices don't rise slowly and steadily; rather, they spike suddenly, causing a recession, which in turn reduces oil demand and drives down prices. When the economy recovers, the cycle starts all over. Because of this dynamic, the production ceiling for oil produces a corresponding ceiling for world economic growth.

SNIP

If this model is accurate—and if the ceiling on global oil production really is around 90 mbd and can be expanded only slowly—it means that every time the global economy starts to reach even moderate growth rates, demand for oil will quickly bump up against supply constraints, prices will spike, and we'll be thrown back into recession. Rinse and repeat.

If you don't believe in global warming, that's one thing. But the evidence that the world is starting to reach growth constraints based on oil production is, if not a slam dunk case, still pretty compelling. So even if, as Rick Perry says, the world's climate scientists are just inventing global warming as a devious scheme to increase their funding, we still ought to be going balls to the wall to expand existing forms of alternative energy and fund research into new ones. Unless, of course, you really like the prospect of a future full of relentless and painful oil-induced recessions. It doesn't seem very agreeable to me.

So drill, baby, drill, right? That certainly seems to be the Obama administration's non-answer, with the State Department's ludicrous determination that the tar sands piepline will have "negligible" environmental impact.

Oil is no longer a luxury we can't afford. Oil is now an explicit drain on the economy. Oil eliminates jobs. Oil adds to the deficit. Oil makes us poorer, sicker and weaker.

The real, obvious and liberal solution is a massive renewable energy Manhattan Project to wrench the country away from disappearing, economy-strangling oil and onto job-creating, economy-growing, stable renewable energy.